Painters Chris Graeb­ner and Jude Lobe along with pot­ter Garry Childs take their inspi­ra­tion for their new work from the earth this month at the Hills­bor­ough Gallery of Arts.

Garry Childs describes his tech­nique, “All of my work is formed on the potter’s wheel from terra-cotta clay. I apply glazes and pig­ments to my pots when they have reached a state pot­ters call “leather-hard” which is when the clay has stiff­ened up enough to han­dle, but is not com­pletely dry. I usu­ally do this by spray­ing, but some­times also with a brush. I then carve through the glaze into the still damp clay to achieve the var­i­ous pat­terns seen on my work.”

Chris Graeb­nerdescribes her inspi­ra­tion for the show, “I love to drive, espe­cially on long trips. Every sum­mer we go to North­ern Michi­gan – to Lake Huron. It’s a trip I love, two days up and two days back, dri­ving through gor­geous scenery, forests and farms. (It’s amaz­ing how many dif­fer­ent types of barns there are!) Last sum­mer, in addi­tion to the trip to Michi­gan, we made a 3700 mile trip to South Dakota, return­ing home by way of Texas and Louisiana. As usual, I did most of the dri­ving. Dri­ving forces me to pay atten­tion to every­thing around me and I’m always amazed by the beauty. Paint­ing is my way of own­ing that beauty, so I greed­ily want to paint it all! My hus­band, Brooks, is patient about tak­ing pho­tos with the cell phone as we sail past inter­est­ing things on the high­way. Most of the paint­ings in this show are of places observed from the car, in our trav­els over the last year.”

The work Jude Lobe presents in Earth­works reflects her love and respect of nature and car­ries the theme that we are con­nected with all liv­ing things. Lobe writes, “Hik­ing, work­ing in the gar­den, day­dream­ing on moun­tains, or lis­ten­ing to the river gur­gle over rocks assures me that even when things are bad, the good will rise again. Nature over­comes adver­sity. Whether it suf­fers from strip-mining, pol­lu­tion, defor­esta­tion, or acid rain; the earth will rebound. New plants will seed a bar­ren land allow­ing new plants to purify the air. But still man is the one that has the largest impact on every­thing in nature; plants, fauna, clean water, arc­tic ice, and so on. It is our respon­si­bil­ity to rec­og­nize that for our sur­vival, we need to pro­tect every­thing in nature.”

Lobe’s medium of choice, cold wax and oil, lends itself per­fectly to express the idea of evo­lu­tion and renewal. It affords the oppor­tu­nity to show a his­tory of the paint­ing by build­ing up lay­ers, obscur­ing what’s beneath, and remov­ing lay­ers to reveal bits of past lay­ers. It becomes a metaphor for a life that is a com­pi­la­tion of bits of past expe­ri­ences. Her works in this show include cold wax & oil paint­ings, encaus­tics, and 3-D works.